Ooh Baby, Baby it's a...

Sad world...

Oh man.

So I watched "THERE WILL BE BLOOD" yesterday and "NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN" today.

I'm in Vancouver, working, which means I'm staving off loneliness with work and movies.  I called my wife this morning, like, six times in an hour and a half.  Little things I wanted to share with her, like the new egg sandwich at Starbucks, the sunshine, things like that.  I told her yesterday that I forget what it was like living alone.  I find myself looking at people trying to figure out which ones are single, which ones are together.  

I was wondering if it's wrong for me to feel 'sad' for the ones that seemed lonely--wrong because I'm only thinking about it from my side of the fence, y'know, like I should cut them some slack because what they know is all they've ever known and who am I to assume that my way of life is better, or more whole, than theirs--then I stop being politically correct and it seems to me that alone is just that, alone, and if asked whether it's better to eat a chicken burrito with my wife and four kids around our dining room table or on the floor of a hotel room with the coffee table replacing our harvest one, it's very clear to me that together is better.

It's what we've been made for.

Together.

And the common denominator in both these 'critically lauded' movies is a bone deep loneliness. So bleak.  I'm sitting there watching the last moments of TWBB and I can't believe what I'm seeing.  Then, I get to the end of NCFOM tonight and I'm feeling the same thing.

Pointless.  Bleak.

Sure, both were impeccably constructed.  Beautifully shot.  Wonderfully acted.  The writing was superb, everything about both films was essentially flawless.

Except for the lack of hope.

"Blah, blah..."  "Go home 'preacher boy'..."

Yeah, I get what you're saying.

I'm not saying anything but that I missed the light.  And I understand why all stories don't have to be happy stories, but I'm really struggling to figure out what the 'value' was in those films. Did they make any contribution to my life?  

TWBB spoke to me about the danger of ambition, the deep evil of dishonesty and a lust for power.  So, o.k, it spoke to me.  But, man, the whole, "I'm a false prophet.  God is a superstition..." thing.  Wow.  So dark.

"Some would say 'honest'..."

Yeah I get that too.  But I wonder if that kind of bleak experience is truly universal or if our artists just 'think it so...'  I wonder if they've been conditioned by years of mounting disillusionment in western culture (our books, our popular culture with all its attachments, our schooling system...) to believe that life is, at its root, hopeless.

Do all people feel hopeless?

One of the near closing lines in NCFOM was little less virulent but still played the 'God card'. "I thought that as I got older God would eventually just come into my life, but He hasn't..."  That felt more authentic to me, yet still hopeless.  And I wondered if the writers, in creating that moment for their character, really felt that people long for an experience of God's life in theirs. I wonder if they think an encounter with God is life's zenith.

Seems like it could be.

Because if God exists and is interested in us then to have some (any) kind of 'communion' with God is to cease from loneliness.   I was reading "I Am Legend" this week too and, again, the central issue in the story was that of loneliness.  

Then I'm walking through Vancouver's streets looking at all the street people and they're so alone.  Nobody (including me) looks at them.  Then I imagined them railing at me for not looking at them and I thought to myself; "It's because you only want me to look at you so that you can harangue me for money!  If you wanted to look at me just to smile and say 'hi' I'd love that, but that's not the case now is it?"

So they're alone sitting there under the lamp post and I'm alone hurrying by.

All of us, divided.

(and before my brother-in-law stops reading this 'depressing' post lemme' try and turn the corner)

Then I saw a commercial with a child asleep in the back seat while her parents drove her to the beach and I thought that maybe there's hope.

Hope in giving oneself away.  

Hope in spending one's life to give to others.  And I don't necessarily mean some kind of 'altruistic' giving but maybe just the simplistic kind, the kind that gives a rose to your wife or a smile to a stranger.  The kind that gives your life to build one so that you can provide one for your kids.  The kind that lays itself out there, risking rejection and pain again and again, for the sake of speaking or making something 'good' that brings life into the existence of another.

'Cause it occurs to me, in the midst of all this loneliness, that it was selfishness that was really the killer in those movies.  And the only antidote for selfishness is selflessness.

To 'find your life' you've got to 'lose' it.

And that's not wisdom I came up with, it's wisdom that came to me.

Like a gift from the blue.  Like water to the desert.  Like a wife to a husband.

Like my kids to their daddy.

Like a new country for all men for whom there was blood.

T